SAM BYFIELD
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
Sunset, I step outside and catch
the west's last luminous seconds, the sky
evolving through its leafy spectrum,
before stars and the high pitched rhetoric
of crickets. Currawongs call in their alien
tongue, bring to mind the gentle language
of seduction, how it plays itself again
in dreams. Every evening this week
I watched the sun threading away,
into the ranges and desert belly
of this country, and I've imagined it
reaching you, setting into the Indian
Ocean, hoped that you would soon be
watching it, wishing that Winter
would hurry, so that I might return.
*
RETURNING TO LA NINA
A lizard's curiousity in the verandah's arched shade.
The smell of farms, a profusion of living after
the monotony of droughts. The garden overflows
and pulses like rainforest, spiders as big as fists
my mother tells me and I'm glad I wasn't here
to see them. Frangipanis hang like eggs, broken
and suspended. The birds are restless and the leaves
are restless. The wind and the heat. Sun's dapple
fascination. Feather pattern on the horizon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLIVE FAUST
MAXIMS, MINIMS, SQUIBS AND ESSAYETTES
1. I didn't know that Phil Whalen had lived next door to Cid in Kyoto, nor about the regular meetings in San Francisco when young. "... and we used to solve the world's problems together." Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations (in my case, with Ian Watson, say) all these years later; but that's mainly so those two young men could stay free of second thoughts , and continue being young. Besides, part of the correction would be to the hope they had; and I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope.
2. Whenever they concoct a new antibiotic for golden staph, the bacteria evolve into strains resistant to it. The micro-organisms are not stupid.
3. People come in and out of our lives casually and accidentally, as if our train were late, and we had to ask a stranger if he knew whether they'd rescheduled it, or whether this one was still meant to be departing on time.
4. I like the sound of a stamp --and on an ink pad too.
5. And real materialists, like Hume, who deny the supernatural, will usually pull some very unlikely deity out of the hat --like the "invisible hand of the market" he invoked for his friend Adam Smith. A lot of obeisance to that Deity round the bourse cathedrals of the world.
6. Blackberries hidden in prickles.
7. "Everything will be forgotten in the days to come." But only if there are days to come. And if there are no days to come, will everything still be forgotten?
8. In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you.
9. All alone one New Year's Eve, so I recalled friends, and had my Auld Lang Syne with the dead.
10. Losses of people. I don't really know how to cope. Oddly enough, the ordinary consolation that it is inevitable and universal, is more desolation than consolation for me: the idea of so much absence, and the dwindling in meaning of any one particular absence in the light/dark of that thought, of that truth in fact, is pretty much unbearable. I think how little now deaths of a hundred years ago mean, or fifty, or from one's earlier life. And how blase was one's own attitude to the death of grandparents, as being inevitable with such old people? And it was --but ... .
11. What happens after After is in the lap of the Gods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THINGS
1
sharing
the tight lipped
outside the world we love
shines attraction more crushing than
ourselves
packets
of compassion
visualise oasis
demons season and spring whisk soups
real zest
welfare
and thorny styles
imbues testy postures
detailing people gives notice
on pride
concerns
of give and take
are parlous excuses
calm moods texture reverie as
armour
full hopes
immerse on trains
while forks cut unawares
with nearly all things quiet and
trafficked
2
Judas
was double crossed
blamed on my ticklish sleeve
as delusion and faults forfeit
friendship
shiners
and leather shoes
fail to impress folklore
open myths verify jackets
tailored
bonfires
not gaiety
are love variances
heaviness radiates roaming
murmurs
umpires
and exchanges
pitch result for losers
a transplant injury mounts new
heart pumps
counsels
rouse my lament
and indict defences
what's the exposed image of lone
wedge tails?
3
lovers
and lapsed rhythms
sour most ardent courses
single mercies cherish pacing
dance steps
rackets
and landing strips
out of nowhere alight
details inflate my wanting to
crash land
milkshakes
lime and raspberry
salute a boy's penchant
while gritty dynamics secure
favours
reviews
and articles
riddle my excitement
incumbent chargers fiddle gripe
lambaste
the soul
cautiously let
have you been here that long?
Godot might ask, are you looking
at me?
[NOTES:
Judas Iscariot (died April, AD 29-33) was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve apostles, and was apparently designated to keep account of the 'money bag' but is traditionally known for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
READING
Academically
She insists
The book is about
Needing to
Observe and extend
Freud's political
Unconscious
When Graffito
Rubs against
the Holy Mary
But he quietly
Counters that
It is merely
And wholly
About Love
Memory paths
Ingrained
The grips of grief
And desires
Thwarted
And so
The Weekend
Begins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Does it help that billions of miles away
planets spin in patterns drawn from spirographs?
Swirls within swirls, fractionally rotating
in invisible patterns, like the way a lily
won't open before your eyes, or how
you might even be that lily, if you don't
concern yourself with the parasite inside;
But that lily I mean, the one you didn't notice,
it's all brown petal now, so make sure you don't step on it,
instead watch your child grow taller, and allow her to lean
away, toward a parallel orbit, accept you are peripheral
and though you might have walked around here for days
and months and years, thinking you must be moving
toward something, each day was simply busy
with its own rewriting of grander patterns,
where you fit, only as a swirl, tracing another
swirl, within another swirl,
that's within another swirl.
*
THREE GOOD THINGS
On any day it might all come down
to three good things, or the way
kindness can return unpredictably
Not everyone believes these things
but today I repeat them as a mantra,
my own song that lifts up and banks
out of the littered street,
the plastic bags whose
contemporary beauty
only serves to remind me
everyone is either buying
or selling, then discarding
These words are too weak,
a breath or two might blow
them out, as a child blows
at candles on a cake.
Three good things
candles, cake, a child.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
SAM BYFIELD, born in 1981, grew up in Newcastle and after stints in Canberra & China now lives in Melbourne. He has published one chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, and his first full-length collection, Borderlands, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney). He has been published in Australia & overseas, most recently in Heat, Famous Reporter, Meridian & The Asia Literary Review.
CLIVE FAUST lives in Bendigo to where he returned in the early '70s after several years in Kyoto. Contributed to The Ear in a Wheatfield in the '70s, featured in the 4th series of Cid Corman's Origin magazine in 1978, included in John Tranter's New Australian Poetry (Makar Press) in 1979, and has published 5 chapbooks (3 with Origin Press) and a selected poems, Cold's Determination (University of Salzburg Press). His review of John Phillips' Language Is appears in Jacket #32 ('07).
ROBERT JORDAN, see note in Poems & Pieces #4
ANNE KIRKER, see note in Poems & Pieces #1
ANN SHENFIELD, see note in Poems & Pieces #2
[Compiled November/December, '08 and typed up this 1st day of January, 2009
Kris Hemensley]
________________________________________________________________
Showing posts with label Robert Jordan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Jordan. Show all posts
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Monday, August 4, 2008
THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #4, July/August, 2008
JENNIFER HARRISON
TEA LEAVES
A man and woman disappear
where the light flows up hill
where an archetypal table has unlaid
its cutlery, emptied the decanters
and seated an absent guest at the head
of the country's upturned table.
We've drawn new flags of crayoned dunes
and bothered the stars with deeper blues.
A rear-vision mirror distracts those
who gaze amazed at the shadows, yet scalded
by our lack of rain, farms lie in the dust
thirsting towards an unguent sun.
Our Tarot cards, transparent,
predict we are unchanged in our changing.
The future is cracked porcelain.
And tea cups, if left to tell their fable
might speak of black stars in a white night,
carcasses scattered across salt pan draught,
snow melting from Antarctic rock,
words disorganising into fear & flight.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN HART
FEBRUARY
There is a weariness that finds a home at last
Inside your bones as winter bites its third thin month,
As though a death were leaning on you all the day
And weighed a shadow more than any man, two men,
Your father's death perhaps that must come very soon,
Grandfather's death that's been and gone yet hangs around;
And then there's a weariness older than the dust,
That spinifex will tell you all about, and more,
One quite at home inside those shattered, simple rocks
You find out west in Queensland when old roads give out,
And in those words you whisper to yourself at night,
Words with dark rooms that open onto darker rooms;
And there's a weariness that's vaguely young, that runs
Its bony fingers through the fringes of your thoughts
And blunts their edge : louche angel of death, your own
Perhaps, though one still hanging loose and at a loss.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
NO LONGER YOUR POEM : TO MICHAEL SHARKEY
No longer am I your poem, your breath has left me,
I am grafted to this page. Go, from now on I keep
verbs to myself, you can no longer tamper
with my pronouns. Punctuate someone else.
I divorce myself from you, disown you
and your pencil thin prerogatives.
I am a postulate, traveling, camping out,
a poem of independent memes.
You remember me as this static page,
your lazy snapshot memory that erases
my early life, my permutations, and later travels.
Are we each a single dose to each other?
I am no longer yours, it is my breath
that holds up the spaces on this page.
I keep your word? You do not.
I am now thou to thee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
Two sequences of cinquain*
treason
and weasel words
crank tangent creeds
a welter of display performs
two-up
flight paths
and soft landings
dad brings his trade song....
Valderie, echoes down Collins
and home
Gusto
and festivals
Japan tailors English
with blossoms springing liaisons
take out
bouquets
and avenues
connive books and burnings
spirit barrels hunger incense
and thirst
households
endure rebuke
table grace pots the word
mum rattles kids scolding water
rations
-----
cool eyes
and assignments
jostle lovers drabness
mistaken paring off hones lost
design
cryptic
and rotten flicks
turns tolerant offense
to advents bending in takeoff
runway
manners
stun tarred silence
goading egotists spray
while camber tarps the revelry
poolside
the scrub
after the fires
cools earthen ceramics
ravages putter turning points
in kiln
film scores
and pot boilers
ghostly lairs surrender
crisp flavors succeed shared outlook
release
--------
[Note : Cinquain, a five line stanza that can simply be a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. In the first sequence, Valderie is the famous song, "I love to go a-wandering along a mountain track"; Collins is Collins Street in Melbourne; Gusto is the name of a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX LEWIS
THREE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SPANISH
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO (1864-1936)
from In the Cemetery of a Castilian Place
Flocks of the dead, among poor walls
are shifting to their common clay.
Poor flocks - the scythe has been put down.
This cross above an empty field
is your only emblem now.
By these walls the sheep have shelter
from the shocks of northern wind,
while history's vain rumours
break up these walls like waves.
Shining like an island in June,
you swim amid a windy sea
of golden grain, while over you
the lark sings its harvester's song.
[The word "barro'' means "clay" in Spanish, but is sometimes used in biblical translation rather than "polvo", "dust". It carries the same biblical associations that "dust" carries in English.]
*
FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1899-1936)
RIDER'S SONG
Cordoba is distant.
And lonely.
Black nag, big moon,
and olives in my saddle bag.
And though I know these roads
I shall not make Cordoba.
Over the plain and through the wind,
black nag, blood moon.
And death is watching me
from the towers of Cordoba.
*
PEDRO GIMFERRER (1945-)
HOMAGE TO JOHANNES SEBASTIAN BACH
In the forest they give chase to Jesus and to elks
With dark sweet diamonds with lilies in their mouths
Silence the steps of Autumn in the villages
Heaven like a name pronounced in a low voice
Jesus Jesus the rifles sounding through Spring
The belly of a naked girl over the sea petal and cloud
The belly of a girl torn open by mastiffs
o my God
*
[ Note : I have tried to make versions that are readable as English poems, and to this end have taken many liberties with the literal texts. Lorca's Cancion de Jinette is rightly famous. Pedro Gimferrer is a prominent Spanish poet born in 1945 who has translated widely from the French & English, including TS Eliot, Beckett & de Sade. De Unamuno, b 1864, was a leading member of the 'Generation of '98'; revered as sage, essayist & novelist who explored existential themes, & also wrote a considerable body of poetry. ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Ian Campbell lives in Sydney. Biographical information contained within his detailed correspondence published in this issue.
Jennifer Harrison [Sydney's loss & Melbourne's gain] is the author of four collections, the most recent of which, Folly & Grief, was published by Black Pepper Press (Melbourne) in 2oo6. A volume of New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Black Pepper in 2009. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Australian women's poetry. Her contact is j.har@bigpond.com
Kevin Hart [Australia's loss & America's gain] left Melbourne in 2001 to take up a position at University of Notre Dame and is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. He has eleven poetry collections (books & chapbooks) including Wicked Heat ('99) & Flame Tree ('02). His several books of literary & philosophical criticism include The Trespass of the Sign; Postmodernism : A Beginner's Guide; The Dark Gaze : Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. A new collection, Young Rain, is due soon from Giramondo (Sydney).
Carol Jenkins continues to record & publish the River Road CD series of Australian poets from her Sydney pad. See Poems & Pieces #1 for more bio. Her first collection of poems is due soon from Puncher & Wattman.
Robert Jordan after a sojourn in Japan, lives in Melbourne's West, thus a Bulldogs supporter. A Guinness & green tea drinker. Once upon a time a painter of icons within the Orthodox community, an exhibiting artist, a tram-conductor, ESL teacher, & always a note-taker. Now, a writer of cinquain. His contact is tahongo@yahoo.com
Alex Lewis lives in Melbourne. Published a collection of prose fiction in 2007 in the wake of his winning the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition. Recently returned from his Grand Tour which included Spain.
Earl Livings lives in Melbourne, heading up the Box Hill creative writing programme and editing Divan, which was Australia's first on-line poetry journal. His collection, Further than Night (Bystander Press) published in 2000. His contact is e.livings@bhtafe.edu.au
TEA LEAVES
A man and woman disappear
where the light flows up hill
where an archetypal table has unlaid
its cutlery, emptied the decanters
and seated an absent guest at the head
of the country's upturned table.
We've drawn new flags of crayoned dunes
and bothered the stars with deeper blues.
A rear-vision mirror distracts those
who gaze amazed at the shadows, yet scalded
by our lack of rain, farms lie in the dust
thirsting towards an unguent sun.
Our Tarot cards, transparent,
predict we are unchanged in our changing.
The future is cracked porcelain.
And tea cups, if left to tell their fable
might speak of black stars in a white night,
carcasses scattered across salt pan draught,
snow melting from Antarctic rock,
words disorganising into fear & flight.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN HART
FEBRUARY
There is a weariness that finds a home at last
Inside your bones as winter bites its third thin month,
As though a death were leaning on you all the day
And weighed a shadow more than any man, two men,
Your father's death perhaps that must come very soon,
Grandfather's death that's been and gone yet hangs around;
And then there's a weariness older than the dust,
That spinifex will tell you all about, and more,
One quite at home inside those shattered, simple rocks
You find out west in Queensland when old roads give out,
And in those words you whisper to yourself at night,
Words with dark rooms that open onto darker rooms;
And there's a weariness that's vaguely young, that runs
Its bony fingers through the fringes of your thoughts
And blunts their edge : louche angel of death, your own
Perhaps, though one still hanging loose and at a loss.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROL JENKINS
NO LONGER YOUR POEM : TO MICHAEL SHARKEY
No longer am I your poem, your breath has left me,
I am grafted to this page. Go, from now on I keep
verbs to myself, you can no longer tamper
with my pronouns. Punctuate someone else.
I divorce myself from you, disown you
and your pencil thin prerogatives.
I am a postulate, traveling, camping out,
a poem of independent memes.
You remember me as this static page,
your lazy snapshot memory that erases
my early life, my permutations, and later travels.
Are we each a single dose to each other?
I am no longer yours, it is my breath
that holds up the spaces on this page.
I keep your word? You do not.
I am now thou to thee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
Two sequences of cinquain*
treason
and weasel words
crank tangent creeds
a welter of display performs
two-up
flight paths
and soft landings
dad brings his trade song....
Valderie, echoes down Collins
and home
Gusto
and festivals
Japan tailors English
with blossoms springing liaisons
take out
bouquets
and avenues
connive books and burnings
spirit barrels hunger incense
and thirst
households
endure rebuke
table grace pots the word
mum rattles kids scolding water
rations
-----
cool eyes
and assignments
jostle lovers drabness
mistaken paring off hones lost
design
cryptic
and rotten flicks
turns tolerant offense
to advents bending in takeoff
runway
manners
stun tarred silence
goading egotists spray
while camber tarps the revelry
poolside
the scrub
after the fires
cools earthen ceramics
ravages putter turning points
in kiln
film scores
and pot boilers
ghostly lairs surrender
crisp flavors succeed shared outlook
release
--------
[Note : Cinquain, a five line stanza that can simply be a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. In the first sequence, Valderie is the famous song, "I love to go a-wandering along a mountain track"; Collins is Collins Street in Melbourne; Gusto is the name of a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEX LEWIS
THREE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SPANISH
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO (1864-1936)
from In the Cemetery of a Castilian Place
Flocks of the dead, among poor walls
are shifting to their common clay.
Poor flocks - the scythe has been put down.
This cross above an empty field
is your only emblem now.
By these walls the sheep have shelter
from the shocks of northern wind,
while history's vain rumours
break up these walls like waves.
Shining like an island in June,
you swim amid a windy sea
of golden grain, while over you
the lark sings its harvester's song.
[The word "barro'' means "clay" in Spanish, but is sometimes used in biblical translation rather than "polvo", "dust". It carries the same biblical associations that "dust" carries in English.]
*
FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1899-1936)
RIDER'S SONG
Cordoba is distant.
And lonely.
Black nag, big moon,
and olives in my saddle bag.
And though I know these roads
I shall not make Cordoba.
Over the plain and through the wind,
black nag, blood moon.
And death is watching me
from the towers of Cordoba.
*
PEDRO GIMFERRER (1945-)
HOMAGE TO JOHANNES SEBASTIAN BACH
In the forest they give chase to Jesus and to elks
With dark sweet diamonds with lilies in their mouths
Silence the steps of Autumn in the villages
Heaven like a name pronounced in a low voice
Jesus Jesus the rifles sounding through Spring
The belly of a naked girl over the sea petal and cloud
The belly of a girl torn open by mastiffs
o my God
*
[ Note : I have tried to make versions that are readable as English poems, and to this end have taken many liberties with the literal texts. Lorca's Cancion de Jinette is rightly famous. Pedro Gimferrer is a prominent Spanish poet born in 1945 who has translated widely from the French & English, including TS Eliot, Beckett & de Sade. De Unamuno, b 1864, was a leading member of the 'Generation of '98'; revered as sage, essayist & novelist who explored existential themes, & also wrote a considerable body of poetry. ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Ian Campbell lives in Sydney. Biographical information contained within his detailed correspondence published in this issue.
Jennifer Harrison [Sydney's loss & Melbourne's gain] is the author of four collections, the most recent of which, Folly & Grief, was published by Black Pepper Press (Melbourne) in 2oo6. A volume of New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Black Pepper in 2009. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Australian women's poetry. Her contact is j.har@bigpond.com
Kevin Hart [Australia's loss & America's gain] left Melbourne in 2001 to take up a position at University of Notre Dame and is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. He has eleven poetry collections (books & chapbooks) including Wicked Heat ('99) & Flame Tree ('02). His several books of literary & philosophical criticism include The Trespass of the Sign; Postmodernism : A Beginner's Guide; The Dark Gaze : Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. A new collection, Young Rain, is due soon from Giramondo (Sydney).
Carol Jenkins continues to record & publish the River Road CD series of Australian poets from her Sydney pad. See Poems & Pieces #1 for more bio. Her first collection of poems is due soon from Puncher & Wattman.
Robert Jordan after a sojourn in Japan, lives in Melbourne's West, thus a Bulldogs supporter. A Guinness & green tea drinker. Once upon a time a painter of icons within the Orthodox community, an exhibiting artist, a tram-conductor, ESL teacher, & always a note-taker. Now, a writer of cinquain. His contact is tahongo@yahoo.com
Alex Lewis lives in Melbourne. Published a collection of prose fiction in 2007 in the wake of his winning the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition. Recently returned from his Grand Tour which included Spain.
Earl Livings lives in Melbourne, heading up the Box Hill creative writing programme and editing Divan, which was Australia's first on-line poetry journal. His collection, Further than Night (Bystander Press) published in 2000. His contact is e.livings@bhtafe.edu.au
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